Talking to Julie Harris About Her 'Literary Ladies'

I interviewed Julie Harris several times over the years but one of my favorites was for a piece I did for The Hartford Courant in 1990 in advance of a tour of "Driving Miss Daisy" at New Haven's Shubert Theater.

By FRANK RIZZO

"Don't call Julie Harris a grand lady of the theater.

Though that accolade is hers for the taking, with a 45-year career that includes some of the most memorable performances on Broadway, such talk makes the actress blush.

"I don;t feel anything like an institution or that I'm a grand lady of anything," says the 64-year-old actress. "When I have enough rest, like today, I feel part of me is convinced I'm still 16. So I have a lot of energy and excitement and curiosity about life."

Harris smiles sweetly, her blue eyes brighten and her voice engages with charm and care. So when she says, "I just feel like I'm still a kid in this wonderful business," you believe every word.

Harris is starring in Alfred Uhry' "Driving Miss Daisy," which is ending its 16-month tour in New Haven.

Though the story of a little old lady from Atlanta and the black driver hired for her by her son could be obvious and sentimental, the writing is spare, gentle and brilliant, Harris says.

"Somebody said to me the other day, 'I love the things that are unspoken in the play. They are so eloquent.' And although the play is very funny and beautifully written, it vibrates with undercurrents. Vividly. It's like Chekhov. All the unspoken things you hear just as loudly as the spoken."

"Daisy" is enjoying a high profile with the national release of the movie of the same name, starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. Harris says she has not yet seen the film.

"It seems very hard to believe that we won't have this in our lives anymore," she says. "It's been a very special play for me and it's been a very happy time for us. We've been a family for a year and a half."

After playing the part for such a long time, will she have post-touring depression?

"Yes," she says. "Absolutely. It will be very strange. I spoke to Wendy Hiller who played Daisy in London and she said, 'Oh, yes, it's a very curious play for missing. It really wraps itself around one. It digs right in.' She said, 'Oh, I'm so lonely without it,' and I said, 'I know exactly what you mean because I'm going to go through that, too, and it will be a sad time."

Connecticut audiences won't have to wait long afterward to see Harris.

After a respite at her Cape Cod home, where she lives alone, Harris will star in "Is He Still Dead?" by Donald Freed, about Nora and James Joyce, which will be the last main stage production for the season at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. The specially commissioned play to celebrate the theater's 25th anniversary will run from May 8 to June 24. It will be directed by Harris' friend, Hartford native Charles Nelson Reilly, who also staged "The Belle of Amherst."

Harris' last Long Wharf appearance was in "Under the Ilex," about the relationship between the Bloomsbury luminaries Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey.

Harris loves her "literary ladies."

She won her fifth Tony Award in the outstanding actress category (the most by any actress) in "The Belle of Amherst" in the late '70s. She has since starred in one-woman shows based on the lives of Charlotte Bronte in "Bronte, A Solo Portrait of Charlotte Bronte," Fanny Stevenson, the American wife of Scottish author Robert Lewis Stevenson in "Tusitula" and Sofya Tolstoy in "The Countess."

She has also commissioned a play by Bill Luce (who wrote "The Belle of Amherst") about author Isak Dinesen, tentativey titled "Lucifer's Child."

"I fall in love with these ladies and their lives," she says. "They all have some special quality. They excite me. I could spend the rest of my liufe [portraying them] very easily."

Nora Joyce is especially compelling to Harris.

"Nora Joyce kept James Joyce alive." Harris says. "It's really because of her stamina and her love and her courage that he finished 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake,' although she was very famous for saying she never read 'Ulysses.' She would say, 'I don't know what's in that dirty book.' "

Before she began portraying literary figures, Harris created a wide range of great characters for the theater, film and television.

After creating a sensation in 1950 playing 12-year-old Frankie in "The Member ofn the Wedding," Harris showed her range by next playing the liberated femme fatale Sally Bowles in "I Am a Camera."

"But to [playwright] John van Druten, I was the last resort. [Getting that role] was a fluke, absolutely a fluke. He had asked almost every actress in America and England. I'm exaggerating probably a little bit. His first choice was Joan Greenwood, and for some reason she was involved with someone in England and didn't want to leave to do the play [in New York]. He also read Cloris Leachman, and she turned it down becauise she had to smoke. Cloris now always says to me, 'You got Sally Bowles because I turned it down because I wouldn't smoke." Well, tough, Cloris," Harris says with a light laugh. "That's all I can say."

Stage roles that followed included Joan of Arc in "The Lark," the title role in "Mademoiselle Colombe," the older woman in "Forty Carats" and Mary Todd Lincoln in "The Last of Mrs. Lincoln."

In movies, he played Abra opposite James Dean in "East iof Eden." She also created memorable characters in films such as "Requiem for a Heavyweight," "The Haunting" and "The Hiding Place."

For television, she was Bridget Mary in "Little Moon of Alban" (recreating her stage role) and Queen Victoria in "Victoria Regina." The two roles won Emmys.

Most of her fans these days, however, recognize her for her role as Lilimae Clenents in the long-running CBS series "Knot's Landing."

"It was fun," Harris says of her television role. "I would have wanted to work more in that series, but since I was a secondary character, I wasn't used a lot. [Lilimae] was unpredictable and silly and wonderful. And they were wonderful actors."

But despite an early career performing small parts with Britain's Old Vic Company during its New York visit in 1946 and an occasional Shakespearean role later in her career, Harris says her classical training is lacking.

"If I have any regrets, I'd say I would liked to have started in the theater in a [classical] repertory company," she says.

Harris did spend a year as a student at the Yale School of Drama from 1944-45, "and then I flung away my student days. But I shouldn't have been there in the first place. I wasn't a graduate student. Figure that out. I think it was because my father had gone to Yale. The war was still on, and I think they let me in because they didn't have enough students to fill it up. But I never heard exactly how it came about."

After Yale came small parts on Broadway, then "The Member of the Wedding," which was a hit.

She stayed in that play for 1 1/2 years before going on to another hit, "I Am a Camera" for two years.

"So you see, I've been very fortunate in the plays that I;ve done, but I haven't really had a classical training. Oh, I did Ophelia for Joe Papp and Juliet in Stratford, Canada and Lady Blanch in 'King John.' But I didn't do enough. I've never done Chekhov professionally. I still hope I do Chekhov somewhere along the line. 'The Sea Gull' and 'The Cherry Orchard.' I'd still love to do those plays."